Tag: sonia sotomayor
As Sotomayor Stumbles, GOP Questions “Wise Latina” Status
WASHINGTON. Under tough questioning by Republican Senators, federal judge Sonia Sotomayor stumbled over several key questions today, leading opponents of her nomination to the Supreme Court to question whether she is in fact the “wise Latina” referred to in an oft-cited 2001 speech.
“Jose Matta? Ricky Bones?”
“Who is the only Puerto Rican pitcher to win 20 games,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas asked Sotomayor in one heated exchange.
“I’m going to go with Javier Vazquez,” the Harvard Law School graduate said to an audible gasp from the gallery.
“That would be Ed Figueroa, 20 wins, 9 losses, 1978,” Cornyn said, as he yielded the balance of his time to Senator Mitch McConnell.
McConnell: “I’m only looking for two albums–that shouldn’t be so hard.”
McConnell, a mambo and cha-cha-cha aficionado, challenged Sotomayor to name two albums by Tito Puente, the Puerto Rican-born “King of Latin Music”.
Sotomayor appeared flustered. “Uh–Santana and Caravanserai?” she asked with hesitation.
Tito Puente
“Carlos Santana is Mexican–not Puerto Rican,” McConnell said with a visible sneer. “Here’s a couple for you: Mambo, Mambo–Hot Timbales!–Mambo King Meets Queen of Salsa–shall I go on?”
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) asked McConnell to stop badgering Sotomayor, and the Kentucky Senator yielded to Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, a less confrontational questioner.
“Stare decisis . . . stare decisis . . . I can’t get it out of my head!”
“Judge Sotomayor,” Alexander began in an unctuous tone that restored a sense of decorum to the Senate hearing room. “I’m sure you’ll agree that West Side Story is one of the greatest works of the American musical theatre.”
“I would, Senator, even though Leonard Bernstein probably learned Latin culture from his cleaning woman.”
“Fair enough. My question–which of that Broadway show’s two gangs–the Jets or the Sharks–is Puerto Rican?”
Sotomayor conferred with her counsel before answering in a halting tone–“The Jets?”
Leahy: “Give her another chance, okay?”
At that point Leahy, who is Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, conceded defeat. “You don’t get a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court,” he said soothingly to the nominee, “but we have the home game version of Senate Confirmation! as a consolation prize.”
GOP Urges Euthanasia as Sotomayor Breaks Ankle
WASHINGTON. Hoping to avoid a nasty confirmation fight in which a victory could cost them crucial Hispanic votes, Congressional Republicans today urged their Democratic colleagues across the aisle to euthanize Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, who broke her ankle this morning.
“Charles Grassley tripped me.”
“It’s the humane thing to do,” said House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio. “For her as much as for us.”
Boehner: “Believe me, it makes me sad just to think about . . . questioning her on live TV.”
Sotomayor fractured her ankle Monday morning at LaGuardia Airport in New York, which is near the Belmont Race Track. Horses at the track that break their legs are “put down”, a euphemism for euthanasia.
“Your horse is okay, but we had to shoot the jockey.”
Democrats said they saw no reason to resort to extreme measures given the extensive vetting that Sotomayor had been given by the Obama administration. “Unlike some of the wackier theories of the strict constructionist school,” said Patrick Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “she still has a leg to stand on.”
Why My Sixth Grade Nun Loves Sonia Sotomayor
In sixth grade, at the tender age of twelve, I had a gigantic nun-crush on my teacher, Sister Gabriella Marie. A member of the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood, “Gabby”, as we affectionately called her behind her back, coached me through spelling bees and oratorical contests, and greased the skids so that I could become Captain of the School Crossing Guard. She thought I had potential, and urged me to go into the priesthood, or to college at Notre Dame.
Sister Gabriella Marie *sigh*, in “throwback” uniform
I passed on those opportunities, but I’ve stayed in touch with her over the years, and I gave her a call the other day to see how she was doing.
“Hi Sister,” I said simply, knowing she’d recognize my voice.
“So it’s you, you little scamp!” she squealed affectionately. “If you hadn’t choked on ‘accelerator’, you could have gone on to nationals!”
“I coulda been a contender, insteada what I am, which is a bum.”
“You’re never going to let me forget it, are you?”
“You’ll burn in purgatory until the end of time for that bonehead mistake,” she said affectionately.
Purgatory, where spitball throwers and spelling bee chokers go.
“How are you?” I asked.
“I-am-in-seventh-heaven!” she pronounced slowly and deliberately, almost ecstatically.
“Why?”
“Sonia Sotomayor!” she exclaimed. I wasn’t sure what to make of this, since the Supreme Court nominee has been reflexively attacked by conservative commentators, and Sister Gabriella was never known for the liberality of her views. She once recommended capital punishment for Scott Walje, who gave her the finger when she sentenced him to detention for throwing a spitball.
The Flight of the Spitball
“Really?” I asked.
“Absolutely!” she replied. “Did you know that she was valedictorian of her grade school class at Blessed Sacrament School, where she had a near-perfect attendance record?”
Perfect attendance–the hallmark of the goody-goody girl. Gag me with a spoon.
“And that’s enough to make you support her?” I asked, turning the critical dialectical skills that she had taught me back against her.
“Not just that, you nimmy-not. She’d be the sixth Catholic on the Supreme Court–we’d finally have the super-majority we need to take over the country!”
“No, Ruth, you can’t have Rosh Hashanah off.”
As someone who has unsuccessfully petitioned the Supreme Court to take an anti-Catholic prejudice case, I knew it wouldn’t be that easy. “Sister, I don’t know where you get some of your crackpot ideas.”
“In the penumbras and emanations of other constitutional protections,” she said, mocking Justice William O. Douglas’s famous loosey-goosey formula for finding a right of privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut, one of the building blocks that led to Roe v. Wade.
Justice Douglas: “Has anyone seen my penumbra?”
“How can you be so sure she’d be good for Catholics?” I asked.
I heard a snort at the other end of the line. “And you’re the one with the law degree?” she asked sarcastically.
“Well, yeah,” I said sheepishly. “But it isn’t every day I get involved in the great social issues that the Court takes on. I’m a business lawyer.”
Flying, not Yawning Nun
I heard her yawn. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m either very tired or you’re very boring. But to answer your question, I’m pretty sure she’s anti-abortion,” Gabby said. “You have read Center for Reproductive Law and Policy v. Bush, haven’t you?”
“Can’t say that I have,” I admitted. “Is that the one where she says the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position with public funds?”
“On the nosey,” she shot back at me. “So she’s an ace in the hole on that topic.”
“What else?”
“She’s a solid vote on religious freedom!”
“You mean the clause of the First Amendment that newspaper reporters always forget about when they say ‘separation of church and state’?”
“You got it, pal,” she said with the same tough-talking tone of voice she used to silence smart-aleck boys in the back row of chorus practice. “And that phrase isn’t even in the Constitution.”
Jefferson: Huge Notre Dame fan.
“I know, it’s in Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, and he actually favored government support of religious schools, as opposed to support of ministers.”
She was silent for a moment. “My God–you may actually have learned something at that godless four-year liberal arts college you went to instead of Notre Dame.”
“No–I went to law school at Boston College.”
“That Doug Flutie is so cute!”
“So–you think she’s a vote to respect religious freedom?” I asked.
“Absolutely. In Hankins v. Light, she voted against government intrusion in the dismissal of an age-discrimination claim by a minister against his church. She said it was unconstitutional to ‘trespass on the most spiritually intimate grounds’ of a religion.”
Sotomayor as a young girl: Perfect attendance!
“Okay, sounds good. What else ya got?”
“In Ford v. McGinnis, she ruled in favor of a Muslim prison inmate who was not allowed to participate in a religious feast.”
Santeria ritual
“Okay, but Islam is the religious flavor-of-the-month among liberals,” I pointed out. “How about something really weird, like Santeria?”
“You mean the religion that incorporates animal sacrifice into its rituals–not for barbecue–and which has previously been before the Court in the case of Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah?”
Reluctant participant in Santeria service
“That’s right,” she said. “Sotomayor ruled in favor of Santeria prison inmates who wanted to wear beads under their clothes in Campos v. Coughlin.”
“Okay,” I admitted, as someone who became a practicing Rastafarian after I left the Roman Catholic faith. “This is starting to sound good. But now for the $64,000 question,” I said. “How about religious symbols on city property, the greatest waste of time since monks stopped arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin?”
“I’ll take the over.”
“She’s for them!” she said. “In Flamer v. City of White Plains, she sided with a rabbi who was denied permission to erect a menorah in a city park.”
I had to admit it–Gabby had done her homework. “That is so freaking cool,” I said. “So what do you think a Catholic caliphate in America would be like?” I asked her.
“Let me lay it out for you,” she said, and proceeded to describe the following program designed to make America more like Catholic grade school:
No Talking in Line: This rule is strictly enforced for reasons of safety and order at Catholic grade schools, and it works; a low drop-out rate, high test scores, and winning hockey and football teams are the results. So get your last artsy-fartsy comment out of your system–“I don’t think Woody Allen’s made a good movie since Broadway Danny Rose!”–because next time you talk in line, you’ll feel the vise-like grip of Sister Mary Clarus on your upper arm.
You talk, you die.
No Meat on Fridays: I hope you like fishsticks. When the nuns are running the place, we’ll go back to the pre-Vatican II days when you had to abstain from meat on Fridays.
Fishsticks: Crunchy, but not delicious.
Clean your plate: Goodbye to nouvelle cuisine–from now on, everybody gets big portions of starchy food, and you have to finish every bite because there’s a nun standing guard at the tray return to make sure you don’t scrape anything into the garbage.
No more boy-girl parties: When Catholics go into the confessional, they have to promise to sin no more and “to avoid the near occasions of sin.” Boy-girl parties lead to dancing, then spin-the-bottle, then kissing in the coat closet, and are thus a “gateway” to violations of the Sixth Commandment barring adultery. How do I know? A one-game suspension from the Sacred Heart School Gremlins seventh-grade basketball team for hosting one! I tried to tell my coach it was my mom’s fault–she was a Protestant and wanted me to have social skills. “And look how that turned out,” was his sneering reply.
Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Fun With Nuns.”
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